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Free Software Foundation history
Free Software Foundation company history timeline
The Free Software Foundation was founded in October 1985, initially to raise funds to help develop GNU.
Stallman told the following story in a talk he gave in 1986:
Through 1987, it was updated in minor ways to account for developments.
Around 1990 there were three freedoms, numbered 1, 2, and 3.
In August 1991, a young Finnish student named Linus Benedict Torvalds, posted a message on one of the group chats:
In 1991, a second version of the GNU GPL was published.
In 1996, Stallman and his colleagues at the Free Software Foundation held a conference.
In February 1998, a few developers and entrepreneurs met in California, in an organization called The Foresight institute.
In 1998 he organized a conference of some of the best and brightest minds in the software world: Linus Torvalds, Guido Van Rossum (the creator of Python), Larry Wall (of Perl) and many other luminaries.
In 1999 Stallman published “The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource,” a paper calling for the creation of an open-source encyclopaedia.
In late 2001, Bradley M. Kuhn (then executive director), with the assistance of Moglen, David Turner, and Peter T. Brown, formalized these efforts into FSF's GPL Compliance Labs.
The first meeting was held on March 15, 2003, at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While FSF was never a party to the lawsuit, FSF was subpoenaed on November 5, 2003.
In the interest of promoting copyleft assertiveness by software companies to the level that the FSF was already doing, in 2004 Harald Welte launched gpl-violations.org.
The first iteration was released for feedback in January 2006.
In the late 2000’s, Apple set the tone in the smartphones’ market. Therefore, in 2006, Google initiated the Android Open Source Project, or ASOP for short – an operating system for smartphones developed by “Android Ltd,” which was bought by Google.
In 2007, the FSF published the third version of the GNU General Public License after significant outside input.
The 30th birthday was marked on October 3rd, 2015 with "The User Freedom Summit," a mini-conference which included two tracks of two sessions each, with a closing talk by Eben Moglen.
But Richard Stallman of 2016 doesn’t own a smartphone or tablet and doesn’t listen to MP3 music files.
Edward Snowden keynotes LibrePlanet 2016
In September 2019, Richard Stallman resigned as president of the FSF after pressure from journalists and members of the open source community in response to him making controversial comments in defense of then-deceased Marvin Minsky on Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking scandal.
October 2020 marked the thirty-fifth year of the Free Software Foundation.
Membership benefits have increased over time, and now include gratis attendance to the annual LibrePlanet conference, a 20% discount on FSF merchandise, and even access to the FSF's own videoconferencing server, which launched in 2020.
Nevertheless, Stallman remained head of the GNU Project and in 2021, he returned to the FSF board of directors.
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Free Software Foundation competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GNU Project | 1984 | $60.0M | 3,000 | - |
| Glasswing International | 2007 | $17.0M | 215 | 2 |
| Smithsonian Institution | - | $1.6B | 6,100 | 1 |
| American Psychological Association | 1892 | $10.0M | 500 | 3 |
| AFL-CIO | 1955 | $154.8M | 477 | 8 |
| American Museum of Natural History | 1869 | $310.3M | 1,382 | 41 |
| Jewish LearningWorks | 1898 | $160,000 | 5 | - |
| Eurasia Foundation | 1992 | $50.0M | 35 | - |
| George W. Bush Presidential Center | 2008 | $780,000 | 50 | - |
| Awbury Arboretum | 1916 | $499,999 | 30 | 1 |
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